Some questions on the Wurm economy and resources

[whystler]

Hi! I bought this game when it was on sale and i have been reading up here and there on the game, which seems to have an even steeper learning curve than EQ(in fact i had originally pegged it as an offline version of a MMO ranging between EQ, VG and UO) when it was new, or EVE Online! Certainly not a small feat!

As i have a very casual mindset and could not commit to any kind of time investment, i intend to start out offline. I have some questions on how certain things work on the server in regard to resources though, as some things clearly seem to be catered heavily to the MMO the stand alone engine was cloned from. It's making me feel like i am trying to set up my own DIKU MUD engine for solo play!

My questions are:

1. If i understand correctly, animals appear randomly at the "edge" of my vision as i explore, until a maximum, defined in the server settings is reached. If i want to change out creatures i have to kill some, and it may be necessary for a GM to ocasionally exterminate animals to prever wandered off ones from hogging slots. Is this true? If so, is there a way to exclude pets and livestock from such extermination and only purge wild animals?
   
2. Ore doesn;t appear to replenish naturally. I caught some hints that at least one of the GM wands can transmute a rock seam into an ore seam. Is this true, and is this the only way to replenish ores? Are there any guides to how to properly manage resources on a server as a GM?
   
3. How often do grass tiles replenish for foraging and botany?
   
4. This is the one that confuses me most. How does gold enter the game, other than through GM commands? I see something about coins being found from monsters and foraging, but that that is also in some way tied to the money pool. How does that work? And what would be the most "fair" way to make coin available if i play offline?

I think those cover most of the raw resources. The rest is a matter of crafting one way or another. A final question i have would be, in Adventure mode, is it possible to play the game like i would any other RPG and just kill monsters, go on quests, explore and buy my food and necessities from NPC's, or do i really need to become self sufficient?

[Lianite]

Hey, glad to see your interested in Wurm!

To answer your questions:

1: With the default settings, the maps have about a 16000 creature limit. They are spawned randomly around the map based on biome settings such as steppe, water, grassland, mountains, etc. GMs can insta-kill anything. If the server is not at maximum population, animals will randomly spawn in.

2: There is a great deal of ore in the world, so much that you will most likely never run out. If you do decide to convert stone tiles into ore, the transmutation rod is the item you are looking for, but it is honestly not needed as each ore "vein" has up to 10,000 units of ore in it. That would take a very long time to mine, process, and use. And there are thousands of veins in the world.

3: Grass tiles can be foraged and/or botanized every 24 real-life hours.

4: Money is primarily obtained through the moment of inspiration, or rarity system. When foraging or botanizing, you have a chance to get a moment of inspriation and that can lead to you getting coins. I have gotten iron coins as well as copper and silver from foraging, so it is completely viable to get by solo through foraging. Killing creatures works the same way. When you kill a creature, you have a chance of a moment of inspiration that will lead to coin as well.

The game was primarily intended for MMO based play, but solo play is completely possible, and you can get by with the NPCs in adventure mode, but it is nowhere near as in depth as most RPGs out there. The greatest way to play this game is to play with a group of people.

I would recommend TheTrust Collective. I joined them about 2 months ago and have loved it so far. Everyone here is very knowledgeable and super helpful. Even if you don't want to join the server, I would recommend hopping on our TeamSpeak server and chatting with our GMs about configuring your local server for solo play. Server advertisement is: http://steamcommunity.com/app/366220/discussions/2/353915309338964050/

I look forward to hearing from you :)

[Lianite]

As a note, the 16,000 creature limit is just default. You can edit that as a GM to be more or less depending on tastes.

[Keenan]

Also to the point of #1 -
Creatures do die of old age, some are prey to other creatures, and there is some culling that goes on when the server starts up.

Creatures exist, live, move and act even if you can't see them. A bear on the other side of the map could be killing a cow and eating it, for example. You may not realize it's happening, but the server handles all of this during polling methods. The world is constantly changing while the server is running, with and without your interaction.

Another note is that reducing the creature count or the aggressive percentage will not kill off creatures. No new ones will spawn while the count is below a certain limit - which is actually less than max to allow for players to breed animals. It's about 50% of maximum when spawning slows down. So if you set to 16,000, you should expect to see an actual count of roughly half that, with the aggressive percentage being a percent of that half.

[Snake Plissken 炎と雨]

Extending Lianite's post:

1) You may set 100,000 creatures and 10% aggressive. Once a day you will suffer from respawn lags. If you change setting to 20,000 creatures and 99% aggressive, probably nothing important will happen around your avatar in the game world. Use GM alt to go across your continent and you will personally observe the facts.

2) You don't need GM and Ebony Wand to place additional resources and veins on your map. It is almost impossible in highest mountains, under thick dirt layer, or under structures unless you have tunnel under the structures. Use hex editor or write simple veins generator/editor (would has less than 100 lines of code including ornamental stuff) to edit map file:

a. calculate position in map (or use your Ebony Wand to read coords) -> [x,y]
b. use coords to calculate offset in file (files)
c. write numbers: ore type and vein size (in mine actions)

Details in source code of one from several generators here: http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/forum/260-tools/

Code snippets are here: <generator_name>\src\net\buddat\wgenerator\TileMap.java (here: void generateOres(...) {...}). Just ask programmers on the Wurm forum (Budda is Wurm developper). Calculation of the offset and editing file with hex editor is much simpler but not "global" in the sense you do not replenish veins in whole map at once. Btw you can replace files with veins map in your server folder without problems. In the end you will see rock in the place of former vein or vein where was rock before map exchange. Similarly you can close tunnels.

3) Not every grass tile. It is random.

4) Fighting, praying, selling stuff to Trader/Merchant/Token too. Irons coins from praying. From inspiration copper and silver coins.

Economy in Wurm is based on "Envoy of the King" event. He gives money (buys items) from Kingdom coffin to all Traders (see server params). Foraged coins and those from selling stuff to tokens etc. also come from the coffin (periodic lack of coins is noticeable in Wurm Online servers with large population): http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/68648-all-about-traders/

About last question: yes it is possible, but you have to write some mod for NPCs. In vanilla version they are almost completelly passive. Traders sell only standard items plus items sold to them by other people. Merchants sell items of other people. Other NPCs from Adventure mode looks like at early stage of scripting system tests. Its all.

[whystler]

Thanks for the replies! I think understand a bit better now.

And while i appreciate the invitations, i prefer to go at it alone for now, given that i have no idea when i have both the mood and the time to actually put a serious chunk of time in this game. And the wide adoption of voice comms is actually one big reason why i am turning away from MMO's, as i seriously prefer not to use them